


You First Make Thieves

by MargotMilevaZ



Category: Welcome to Night Vale
Genre: But Desert Bluffs is worse, Cecil is far more competent than he lets on, Gen, Night Vale is a bad bad place, Parallel Universes, Science, Strexcorp, Thomas More's Utopia, probably, really bad science
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2014-01-21
Updated: 2014-01-21
Packaged: 2018-01-09 13:52:11
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 321
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1146756
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/MargotMilevaZ/pseuds/MargotMilevaZ
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>"Umm, in the California portion of the Mojave Desert, just sort of drive around until you get on Route 800. You'll find us eventually. Probably." --Night Vale City Council to Miskatonic University Geology Department.<br/>---<br/>After a few too many reeducations for knowing what he can't help, Cecil Palmer, the long-time Voice of Night Vale, feels he is steadily losing his mind. His beloved hometown continues to reveal terrible things to him, about him, about the land, about their apparently incompetent city council. Some people are gradually waking up, especially young Tamika Flynn. The town's new scientists remain baffled.</p>
            </blockquote>





	You First Make Thieves

**Author's Note:**

> This was quite a bit inspired by His Dark Materials. (Those two series are just ripe for crossovers.) No daemons or zeppelins or cool stuff like that though. Just the general existentialism.

“For if you suffer your people to be ill-educated, and their manners to be corrupted from their infancy, and then punish them for those crimes to which their first education disposed them, what else is to be concluded from this, but that you first make thieves and then punish them.” -Thomas More, _Utopia_

* * *

Circa 40,000 BCE and shapes flowed across the ground. Not shapes so much as shimmers in the heat, shimmers barely conscious enough to observe themselves and allow for their continued floating existence, because God knows nobody else looks, could look, to this desolate region. Somewhere far North, Homo sapiens sapiens were crossing into this formerly unobserved continent, but it would be a long long time before they’d make it this far south, name it Mojave, and still much longer before it’d be called California and people would come to the specific place.

The shapes, despite being barely aware they were indeed things that existed, were clairvoyant. This would seem impressive until one realized they were too primitive to even have a sense of time. Time existed all at once for them, and time existed all at once for this place. Whether our ability to focus on one moment has been an advance or a regression is debatable

Ghosts of cars and people and an ancient overland ocean were visible to the shimmers in that empty flat red desert. Together they cut tablet-shapes from the rock, scratched notes in mangled English, Spanish, and Sumerian (the shapes had just come from Mesopotamia, or maybe they could see all the way to Mesopotamia—space was also not understandable for the shimmers). They dug shallow graves for the tablets and watched the dust of millennia bury and unbury them in an instant. 

They’d accomplished something. Now more solid, they grew hoods (hoods were a thing right now, way up North, where the closest human beings were) and waited forty thousand years.


End file.
